It is time for Zorba to start meditating, and it is time for the people who are meditators not to allow themselves to escape from the world... Only in completion is there bliss. Only in completion have you come home.
Osho

Thursday, 30 May 2013

Gurdjieff used to tell his disciples, “When the arrow of your consciousness becomes double-pointed, when your consciousness begins to flower at both ends, you will become an enlightened being.” Gurdjieff’s efforts in directing his disciples were all to this end. When you look at someone, look at him, but also keep trying to look at your own self: “I am looking, I am the observer.” Then you are sharpening the other edge of the arrow of your consciousness. One end is directed towards the object you see.

Don’t leave the world of objects. Rather, try to become aware of both the subject and the object simultaneously, the outer and the inner simultaneously. If both are there, only then can you be balanced between them.

Try this: in any way just become neutral, indifferent. Suddenly mind has no function. If you are for, you can think; if you are against, you can think. If you are neither for nor against, what is left to think? Be indifferent to the extremes. A balancing happens. This balancing will give you a new dimension of feeling where you are both the knower and the known, the world and the other world, this and that, the body and the mind. You are both and, simultaneously, neither — above both. A triangle has come into existence.

Just sit under a tree. The breeze is blowing and the leaves of the tree are rustling. The wind touches you, it moves around you, it passes. But don’t allow it just to pass you; allow it to move within you and pass through you. Just close your eyes, and as it is passing through the tree and there is a rustling of the leaves, feel that you are also like a tree, open, and the wind is blowing through you ― not by your side but right through you.

The rustling of the tree will enter in you, and you will feel that from every pore of your body the air is passing. It is really passing through you. It is not only imagination, it is a fact ― you have forgotten. You are not only breathing through the nose, you are breathing through the whole body ― from every pore of it, from millions of pores. If you are allowed to breathe through your nose, but all the pores of your body are closed, painted, you will die within three hours. You cannot be alive just by breathing through the nose. Every cell of your body is a living organism, and every cell is breathing. The air is really passing through you, but you have lost the contact. So sit under a tree and feel.

In the beginning it will look like imagination, but soon it will turn into a reality. It is a reality ― that the air is passing through you. Then sit under a rising sun, and not only feel that the rays of the sun are touching you, but that they are entering you and passing through you, so you become vulnerable, you begin to feel open.

The ego is the barrier. When you feel you are, you are so much that nothing can enter in you. You are filled with your own self. When you are not, then everything can pass through you. You have become so vast that even the divine can pass through you. The whole existence is now ready to pass through you, because you are ready. So the whole art of religion is how not to be, how to dissolve, how to surrender, how to become an open space.

“Whether or not we are happy depends on our awareness. When you have a toothache, you think that not having a toothache will make you very happy. But when you don’t have a toothache, often you are still not happy. If you practice awareness, you suddenly become very rich, very very happy. Practicing Buddhism is a clever way to enjoy life. Happiness is available. Please help yourself to it.”

“Suppose while walking in the twilight, you see a snake, and you scream, but when you shine your flishlight on it, it turns out to be a rope. This is an error of perception. During our daily lives we have many misperceptions. If I don’t understand you, I may be angry at you all the time. We are not capable of undrstanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering.”

We live in the age of ‘busy’. Busy people not only do a lot, they think a lot. Being lost in thought, is not only tiring and a brilliant way of waste energy, it’s as if we have forgotten the very ground of our being which is still and silent. Learn to meditate and turn the eye of your attention and awareness within, let your mind be quiet and allow your being to be still.

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

"As you breathe in and breathe out the mantra, repeat the sound of HU and imagine the beauty and the peace and the stillness that comes from being present to this aspect of yourself. As you just imagine, then the space between your eyebrows, the third eye, begins to allow for a stream of light to come into your body and imagination becomes real. Like children; in the beginning you imagine and in the end you are speaking the language that you're learning. You are being that wonderful aspect that you're imagining. Your whole body honours that in such a way that it becomes real. As the third eye opens through your imagination, to light, then that light becomes you; it begins to change the chemistry of your whole brain in a way where there is no more space for the negative. The imagination breaks the karmic wheel that allows for the negative to keep repeating itself. You bring in the potential to that space, and there is no space for the negative. The negative is around but it's not your focus. Like Rumi said, your heart completely dissolves in the space of love. Completely comes back home to a space that is pure love."

There have been moments in your life when you were pure awareness. No concepts, no thoughts like "I am aware" or "That is a tree" or "Now I am meditating." Just pure awareness. Openness. A spacious quality in your existence. Perhaps it happened as you sat on a river bank and the sound of the river flowed through you. Or as you walked on the beach when, the sound of the ocean washed away your thinking mind until all that remained was the walking, the feeling of your feet on the sand, the sound of the surf, the warmth of the sun on your head and shoulders, the breeze on your check, the sound of the seagull in the distance.

For that moment your image of yourself was lost in the gestalt, in the totality of the moment. You were not clinging to anything. You were not holding on to the experience. It was flowing--through you, around you, by you, in you. At that moment you were the experience. You were the flow. There was no demarcation between you-sun-ocean-sand. You had transcended the separation that thought creates. You were the moment in all its fullness.

Everyone has had such experiences. These moments are ones in which we have "lost ourselves," or been "taken out of ourselves," or "forgotten ourselves." They are moments in flow.

It is in these moments of your life that there is no longer separation. There is peace, harmony, tranquility, the joy of being part of the process. In these moments the universe appears fresh; it is seen through innocent eyes. It all begins anew.

He is saying this is what life is: “Immobile haze. Moon, spring, sleep” — simple, no complication.

A sannyasin lives a life of such simplicity: the moon, the spring, the sleep — and he is fulfilled. A little immobile haze, and then arises the moon, then comes the spring — there are flowers — and then the sleep.

If you can conceive life in such simple terms — a little dance, a little love, a little playfulness, a little laughter, a little music, and then comes the eternal sleep, life becomes just a small drama. Soon the drama will be over. The acceptance that the drama will be over, that we are just players in a game which is not going to last forever — we will have to vacate the place for other players — then life becomes very simple, without any complexity and without any competition. One lives silently, peacefully, and prepares himself for the eternal peace, the eternal silence, the eternal sleep.

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

In my hermitage in France there is a bush of japonica, Japanese quince. The bush usually blossoms in the spring, but one winter it had been quite warm and the flower buds had come early. During the night a cold snap arrived and brought with it frost. The next day while dong walking meditation, I noticed that all the buds on the bush had died. I recognized this and thought, This New Year we will not have enough flowers to decorate the altar of the Buddha.

A few weeks later he weather became warm again. As I walked in my garden I saw new buds on the japonica manifesting another generation of flowers. I asked the japonica flowers: "Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?" The flowers replied to me: "Thay, we are not the same and we are not different When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not we go into hiding. It’s as simple as that."

This is what the Buddha taught. When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient things withdraw. They wait until the moment is right for them to manifest again.

Before giving birth to me, my mother was pregnant with another baby. She had a miscarriage, and that person wasn’t born. When I was young I used to ask the question: was that my brother or was that me? Who was trying to manifest at that time? If a baby has been lost it means that conditions were not enough for him to manifest and the child has decided to withdraw in order to wait for better conditions. "I had better withdraw; I’ll come back again soon, my dearest." We have to respect his or her will. If you see the world with eyes like this, you will suffer much less. Was it my brother that my mother lost? Or maybe I was about to come out but instead I said, "It isn’t time yet," so I withdrew.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, ‘Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don’t want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy.” If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry.

That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.

Maybe a father does not have time or is not brave enough to ask his son such a question. Then the love between them will not be as full as it could be. We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don’t ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.

Monday, 27 May 2013

“The source of love is deep in us, and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, or one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring him joy. One word can give comfort and confidence, destroy doubt, help someone avoid mistake, reconcile a conflict, or open the door to liberation. One action can save a person’s life or help him take advantage of a rare opportunity. One thought can do the same, because thoughts always lead to words and actions. If love is in our heart, every thought, word, and deed can bring a miracle. Because understanding is the very foundation of love, word and actions that emerge from our love are always helpful.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, taken from “Meditation on Love” in Peace Is Every Step

“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”

There is a part of you that is perfect and pure. It is untouched by the less-than-perfect characteristics you have acquired by living in a less than perfect world. This part of you is a still and eternal star. Make time to reach it and this will bring you untold benefit.

Where there is worry, there cannot be any rest or comfort. Where there is fear there cannot be any peace. However you are embodiments of solutions who find a solution to every problem and this is why you are free from worry and fear. Any problem that comes in front of you comes to play games with you, not to make you afraid.

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

You don’t need to search for peace; you are a being of peace. Any time, any place, you can step back from your thoughts and emotions. Just withdraw into your inner being, a place of total peace and just be.

Stupidity is repetition, repeating others. It is cheap, cheap because you need not learn. Learning is arduous. It needs guts to learn. Learning means one has to be humble. Learning means one has to be ready to drop the old, one has to be constantly ready to accept the new.

Sunday, 19 May 2013

This very body, the Buddha: yes, you.

“If everything is okay [with your body] you remain completely unaware of it and, really, that is the moment when contact can be made — when everything is okay — because when something goes wrong then that contact is made with illness, with something that has gone wrong and the wellbeing is no longer there. You have a head right now; then the headache comes and you make contact.

“But we have almost lost that capacity. Try to make contact with your body when everything is good.

“Just lie down on the grass, close the eyes and feel the sensation that is going on within, the wellbeing that is bubbling inside. Lie down in a river. The water is touching the body and every cell is being cooled. Feel inside how that coolness enters, cell by cell, and goes deep into the body. The body is a great phenomenon, one of the miracles of nature.

“Sit in the sun. Let the sunrays penetrate the body. Feel the warmth as it moves within, as it goes deeper, as it touches your blood cells and reaches to the very bones. Sun is life, its very source. So with closed eyes just feel what is happening. Remain alert, watch and enjoy.

“By and by you will become aware of a very subtle harmony, a very beautiful music continuously going on inside. Then you have the contact with the body; otherwise you carry a dead body.

“Your body can be used as a mechanism; then you need not be very sensitive about it. The body goes on saying many things you never hear because you don’t have any contact. So try to be more and more sensitive about your body. Listen to it; it goes on saying many things, and you are so head-oriented you never listen to it.

“Whenever there is a conflict between your mind and body, your body is almost always going to be right more than your mind, because the body is natural, your mind is societal. The body belongs to this vast nature, and your mind belongs to your society, your particular society, age and time. The body has deep roots in existence and the mind is just wavering on the surface. But you always listen to the mind, you never listen to the body. Because of this long habit contact is lost.

“The whole body vibrates around the center of the heart just as the whole solar system moves around the sun. You became alive when the heart started beating, you will die when the heart stops beating. The heart remains the solar center of your body. Become alert to it. But you can become alert, by and by, only if you become alert to the whole body.”

“The basic thing to be understood is that you are not the mind — neither the bright one nor the dark one. If you get identified with the beautiful part, then it is impossible to disidentify yourself from the ugly part; they are two sides of the same coin. You can have it whole, or you can throw it away whole, but you cannot divide it.

“The whole anxiety of man is that he wants to choose that which looks beautiful, bright; he wants to choose all the silver linings, leaving the dark cloud behind. But he does not know that silver linings cannot exist without the dark cloud. The dark cloud is the background, absolutely necessary for silver linings to show.

“Choosing is anxiety.

“Choosing is creating trouble for yourself.

“Being choiceless means: the mind is there and it has a dark side and it has a bright side — so what? What has it to do with you? Why should you be worried about it?

“The moment you are not choosing, all worry disappears. A great acceptance arises, that this is how the mind has to be, this is the nature of the mind — and it is not your problem, because you are not the mind. If you were the mind, there would have been no problem at all. Then who would choose and who would think of transcending? And who would try to accept and understand acceptance?

“You are separate, totally separate.

“You are only a witness and nothing else.

“But you are being an observer who gets identified with anything that he finds pleasant — and forgets that the unpleasant is coming just behind it as a shadow. You are not troubled by the pleasant side — you rejoice in it. The trouble comes when the polar opposite asserts — then you are torn apart.

“But you started the whole trouble. Falling from being just a witness, you became identified. The biblical story of the fall is just a fiction. But this is the real fall — the fall from being a witness into getting identified with something and losing your witnessing.

“Just try once in a while: Let the mind be whatever it is. Remember, you are not it. And you are going to have a great surprise. As you are less identified, the mind starts becoming less powerful, because its power comes from your identification; it sucks your blood. But when you start standing aloof and away, the mind starts shrinking.

“The day you are completely unidentified with the mind, even for a single moment, there is the revelation: mind simply dies; it is no longer there. Where it was so full, where it was so continuous — day in, day out, waking, sleeping, it was there — suddenly it is not there. You look all around and it is emptiness, it is nothingness.

“And with the mind disappears the self. Then there is only a certain quality of awareness, with no ‘I’ in it. At the most you can call it something similar to ‘am-ness,’ but not ‘I-ness.’ To be even more exact, it is ‘is-ness’ because even in am-ness some shadow of the ‘I’ is still there. The moment you know its is-ness, it has become universal.

“With the disappearance of the mind disappears the self. And so many things disappear which were so important to you, so troublesome to you. You were trying to solve them and they were becoming more and more complicated; everything was a problem, an anxiety, and there seemed to be no way out.

“I remind you of the story The Goose is Out. It is concerned with the mind and your is-ness.

“The master tells the disciple to meditate on a koan: A small goose is put into a bottle, fed and nourished. The goose goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and fills the whole bottle. Now it is too big; it cannot come out of the bottle’s mouth — the mouth is too small. And the koan is that you have to bring the goose out without destroying the bottle, without killing the goose.

“Now it is mind-boggling.

“What can you do? The goose is too big; you cannot take it out unless you break the bottle, but that is not allowed. Or you can bring it out by killing it; then you don’t care whether it comes out alive or dead. That is not allowed either. “Day in, day out, the disciple meditates, finds no way, thinks this way and that way — but in fact there is no way. Tired, utterly exhausted, a sudden revelation...suddenly he understands that the master cannot be interested in the bottle and the goose; they must represent something else. The bottle is the mind, you are the goose...and with witnessing, it is possible. Without being in the mind, you can become identified with it so much that you start feeling you are in it!

“He runs to the master to say that the goose is out. And the master says, “You have understood it. Now keep it out. It has never been in.”

“If you go on struggling with the goose and the bottle, there is no way for you to solve it. It is the realization that, “It must represent something else; otherwise the master cannot give it to me. And what can it be?” — because the whole function between the master and the disciple, the whole business is about the mind and awareness.

“Awareness is the goose which is not in the bottle of the mind. But you are believing that it is in it and asking everyone how to get it out. And there are idiots who will help you, with techniques, to get out of it. I call them idiots because they have not understood the thing at all.

“The goose is out, has never been in, so the question of bringing it out does not arise.

“Mind is just a procession of thoughts passing in front of you on the screen of the brain. You are an observer. But you start getting identified with beautiful things — those are bribes. And once you get caught in the beautiful things you are also caught in the ugly things, because mind cannot exist without duality.

Friday, 17 May 2013

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

Happiness is man’s nature. You need not worry about happiness at all, it is already there. It is in your heart — you just have to stop being unhappy, you have to stop the mechanism functioning that creates unhappiness.

But nobody seems to be ready for that. People say, “I want happiness.” It is as if you go on saying, ‘I want health’ — and you go on clinging to your disease, and you don’t allow the disease to go. If the doctor prescribes the medicine, you throw away the medicine; you never follow any prescription. You never go for a morning walk, you never go swimming, you never go running on the beach, you never do any exercise. You go on eating obsessively, you go on destroying your health — and again and again you go on asking where to find health. But you don’t change the mechanism that creates unhealth.

Health is not something to be attained somewhere, it is not an object.

Health is a totally different way of living. The way you are living creates disease, the way you are living creates misery.

For example, people come to me and they say they would like to be happy, but they cannot drop their jealousy. If you can’t drop your jealousy, love will never grow — the weeds of jealousy will destroy the rose of love. And when love does not grow, you will not be happy. Because who can be happy without love growing? Unless that rose blooms in you, unless that fragrance is released, you cannot be happy.

Now people want happiness — but just by wanting, you cannot get it. Wanting is not enough. You will have to see into the phenomenon of your misery, how you create it — how in the first place you became miserable, how you go on becoming miserable every day — what is your technique?

Because happiness is a natural phenomenon — if somebody is happy there is no skill in it, if somebody is happy it needs no expertise to be happy.

Animals are happy, trees are happy, birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Only man is so clever as to create unhappiness — nobody else seems to be so skillful. So when you are happy it is simple, it is innocent, it is nothing to brag about. But when you are unhappy you are doing great things to yourself; you are doing something really hard.

Mind is a very businesslike, calculating mechanism; it has nothing to do with love. Love will be a chaos, it will disturb everything in it. Heart has nothing to do with business — it is always on holiday. It can love, and it can love without ever turning its love into hate; it has no poisons of hate.

"This morning, when I woke up, a thought came to my mind, that it is not difficult to see the Divine in the enlightened, or in the good people. But it is a challenge to see the Divine in the foolish, stupid and the wicked. In the stupid and wicked people, it is very difficult to see the Divine. And it is these people that bother our mind. When you sit for meditation, what bothers you? It is the wicked person or the stupid person that bothers you. Just see that even they are the manifestation of the Divine, then the mind shifts to another level of consciousness. Your consciousness shifts to another level wherein you see that oneness, that one Divinity in everybody and in everything. This enables us to go deep within."

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Women Have Been Taught…

Man has been taught to be just a man: never to show any feminine traits, never to show any softness of the heart, never to show any receptivity, always be aggressive. Man has been taught never to cry, never weep – because tears are feminine.

Women have been taught never to be in any way like the male: never to show aggression, never show expression, to always remain passive, receptive. This is against reality, and this has crippled both.

In a better world, with better understanding, a man will be both, a woman will be both – because sometimes a man needs to be a woman. There are moments when he needs to be soft – tender moments, love-moments. And there are moments when a woman needs to be expressive and aggressive – in anger, in defence, in rebellion. If a woman is simply passive, then she will turn into a slave automatically. A passive woman is bound to become a slave – that’s what happened down the ages. And an aggressive man, emphatically aggressive and never tender, is bound to create wars, neurosis in the world, violence.

Man has been fighting, continuously fighting; it seems that man exists on the earth just to fight. In three thousand years there have been five thousand wars. War continues somewhere or other, the earth is never whole and healthy…never a moment without war. Either it is in Korea, or it is in Vietnam, or it is in Israel, or India, Pakistan, or in Bangladesh; somewhere the massacre has to continue.

Man has to kill. To remain man, he has to kill. Seventy-five percent of energy is put into war effort, into creating more bombs, hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, and so on and so forth.

It seems that man’s whole purpose here on earth is war. The war heroes are respected the most. The war politicians become the great names in history: Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong – these names are going to remain. Why? – Because they fought great wars, they destroyed. Whether in aggression or in defense – that is not the point – but these were the warmongers.

And nobody ever knows who was aggressive – whether Germany was aggressive or not. It all depends on who writes the history. Whosoever wins will write the history, and he will prove the other was the aggressor. History would be totally different if Adolf Hitler had been victorious. Yes, the Nuremberg trials would have been there, but the Americans and English and French generals and politicians would have been on trial. And history would have been written by Germans; naturally they would have a different vision. Nobody knows what is true.

But one thing is certain: that man puts his whole energy into war effort. The reason? – The reason is that man has been taught to be just man, his woman has been denied. So no man is whole.

And so is the case with woman – no woman is whole. She has been denied her male part. When she was a small child she could not fight with boys, she could not climb on the trees; she had to play with dolls, she had to play ‘house’. This is a very, very distorted vision.

Man is both, so is woman – and both are needed to create a real, harmonious human being. The existence is dialectical; and opposites are not only opposites, they are complementaries too.

If you are utterly silent, then everything that happens in that silence, takes on a new color. It becomes the very birth of art.

‘Song of rice planters’ — it is not much of a music. Poor rice planters, just to keep them engaged, they are singing in chorus. But a man of silence, immediately makes or gives a glamor to the ordinary stones.

‘Song of rice planters, chorus from nowhere.’ As far as he is concerned he is utterly silent, so he wonders from where this chorus is coming. The whole existence has become a chorus, a beautiful symphony. Our lives can be lived as music, as poetry, as art...as mystics. Those are the right ways to live our lives. Right, because to live those styles, you will have to find your origin first.